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Worriedly, her delicate brows knitting, "It's absurd, but," said Arlee, "they could have traced us, I suppose, from my telegraphing at that little native station for my trunks to be sent." "And mine," said Billy. "And from my trying to get my letter of credit cashed." "That Captain could have telegraphed to all the places down the line to know if we'd been seen "
Arlee felt her mouth parched and her tongue dry and curling; her skin was feverishly hot; her whole body burned and ached, and her head was giddy with the heat and the hunger. But she thought how little a thing it was to be hot and hungry and tired when one was free.
He was in luck to get off with nothing but a scratch." "A scratch ? You mean you don't mean ?" "He didn't tell you that?" Falconer was surprised; he had imagined that Billy's narration had led romantically to Billy's wound. He made the American a silent apology. "He was shot in the arm." "Badly?" "Of course not badly he's all right now, isn't he? He said it was a scratch." Arlee was silent.
It was the same clerk he had coerced with real cigars to enlighten him concerning Arlee Beecher, and he felt that that clerk was thinking things about him now, mistaken and misguided things, about his predilections for the ladies. Philosophically he wondered where they had better try after this. But he underestimated the battery of Fritzi's charms, or else the serene assurance of her manner.
In its beams the three stood staring queerly at each other. Arlee saw a slim, wiry young American, in rough khaki clothes stained with work, a browned, unshaven young man with sleepy looking eyes and a mouth like a steel trap. What the excavator saw was more surprising.
It was a local, a train of corridor compartments. In one, marked "Ladies Alone," Arlee was ensconced, with an Englishwoman and her maid, and two pleasant German women, and in another Billy B. Hill sat opposite some young Copts and lighted pipe after pipe.
Back of them beyond the wall, pandemonium was breaking out. He was dumb with the shock. Then, "Who are you?" he demanded. "And where is she where is Arlee Beecher?" On her own face the astonishment grew. "What you mean? Frederick he not send you?" she gasped, and then as the outcries grew louder and louder behind them she gripped convulsively at his arms.
It was a spot of stark loneliness and utter silence, of ancient terror and desolate abandonment; the solitude and the blackness and the aching age smote upon the imagination like a heavy hand upon harp strings. "Who are they?" Arlee spoke in a hushed voice, as if the cat-headed women were straining their ears. "They're mysteries," said Billy, speaking in the same low tone.
This might be modified in a day or two, but for the present they were too frightened to make exceptions. And they were going up the Nile Friday morning, Arlee remembered numbly. And this was Thursday night. "Did the Evershams did they answer my letter?" she said with dry lips. The Evershams, it seemed, had not been at the hotel.
He was still staring a saturnine Pasht out of countenance. There was a pause. Then, "However were you able to think of it all?" said Arlee in slow wonder. "However were you able to think such an impossible thought as my imprisonment?" "Because I was thinking about you," said Billy. Suddenly his tongue ran away with him. "Incessantly," he added. She looked up at him.
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